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Friday Mish-Mosh

1. Since we talked Green Cleaning in the Everyday Advocate series, I found a couple more posts that offer green product suggestions for replacing Comet (baking soda, liquid soap, vinegar), dealing with grout (hydrogen peroxide and water), and more. As I find pins related to things we talk about here, I’ll put them on a board called “From the Blog,” if you want to follow.

2. A while ago I wrote about public restrooms in L.A. This last week, there was a piece in the NY Times on public restrooms in India. Did you know that public restrooms for women are offered at a severely disproportionate rate compared to men?

The municipal government provides 5,993 public toilets for men, compared with only 3,536 for women. Men have an additional 2,466 urinals. (A 2009 study found an even greater imbalance in New Delhi, the national capital, with 1,534 public toilets for men and 132 for women.)

The whole story is really fascinating in terms of how this issues connects to poverty. Learn about the Right to Pee campaign here.

3. Curtis in particular is very excited to see this today:

Disney Pixar’s Brave.

This is in part because he originally thought Merida’s name was Meredith. Incidentally, while I cannot shoot a bow and arrow, our family does have their own plaid.

Correction from my mother:

OK, dear, so you don’t have a “family plaid.” You come from 3 clans, all of which have several tartans: Buchanan (my mom’s mom), Burns (your dad’s paternal line), and Russell (my dad’s mom). I have neglected your Scot literacy.

All I knew was that I have a teddy bear in plaid that family connected. (It’s Buchanan, I guess.)

Anyway…

I’m excited to see how they represent the first female lead in a Pixar film. There’s a lot of talk about that right now, and I liked how Jen Doll put it in her post:

How do you capture what makes a girl character a girl character, but also empower her, and not compromise what makes her her? How do you make those characters appealing and real but present a greater social construct that’s not sexist or so politically correct as to be unrelateable?

This week, I also saw a friend’s link to an older blog post that compiled ‘non-traditional princess stories.’ I think it’s tricky to create stories about people (not just girls) that avoid overly playing heavily into gender roles on the one hand and creating characters that behave exactly opposite of their gender’s trends on the other. Those are the easier stories to write.

Will you be seeing Brave? Do you have strong feelings about gender roles and protagonists in stories?